When Bertrand Badré plonked himself down in the cafeteria in the gleaming white headquarters of the World Bank recently, he found himself in a surrealistic chat with a senior executive.

‘You know Bertrand, they want to fire 3,000 people,’ the executive innocently said. ‘Who is they?’ Badré asked, before a long silence.

The coin dropped on the other side of the table and his conversation partner chirped back: ‘Maybe it’s you.’

Unique: The French vice-president of the World Bank is a gregarious, almost cuddly figure, who's tenth-floor office reflects his quixotic tastes

If the rumoured figure had been true, it would have been a fairly hefty cut given that the bank’s total headcount is 10,000.

Badré doesn’t have the look of an axe-man. Far from it, in fact. The French vice-president of the World Bank is a gregarious, almost cuddly figure, who’s tenth-floor office reflects his quixotic tastes.

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Almost every inch of wall space is filled with his own collection of original comic art from the Belgian creator of Tintin. And to fill in any gaps he has dug deep into the bank’s collections to find art work in the style of Roy Lichtenstein.

Nor does he want a reputation as a job cutter. He wants to be seen as an innovator taking financial products developed for one region, such as a financial mechanism used to protect Uruguay’s hydroelectric-dominated energy sector in times of drought, to another.

His ambition is to develop ‘two or three blockbusters’ – like the loan swap agreement invented at the Bank several decades ago – over the next 20 years.

In the corridors, back offices and cafes in the World Bank headquarters, Badré has become the most gossiped about figure since the bureaucracy rose up against former president Paul Wolfowitz, eventually forcing him out of office amid allegations he had fast-tracked the career of his then woman friend.

Making enemies of the peculiarly precious Bank staff – one of the most over-educated cadres in the world, with its extraordinary array of PhDs – can be dangerous.

The arrival of Badré as the World Bank’s top financial official has been an unexpected and unwanted surprise for many staff.

They had wanted an untroubled life when President Obama replaced the experienced Republican economic official Bob Zoellick with the renowned medical academic Jim Yong Kim in April 2012.

Kim made the eradication of extreme poverty by the year 2030 his cause and was seen as a potentially inspirational leader.

But he lacked the financial tools to run an organisation with Bank in its title during a period of unprecedented global turmoil.

Kim’s answer was to court Badré, who has been the chief financial officer of two French banks and found himself at the heart of the 2007/08 credit crunch at Crédit Agricole, and who struck up a close relationship with former IMF managing director Michel Camdessus during a stint at Lazard.

‘Jim, if you want a chief treasurer, I’m not interested; if you want a chief accountant I’m not interested,’ Badré told the World Bank president.

‘If you want a chief transformation officer, that is interesting. The World Bank still has some money, still has some people and we have the most fantastic brand name on earth to do finance.

'So if we are not totally stupid, if we combine money, people and brand we can do extraordinary things,’ he added.

Badré recognised early on that if the bank needed to pass the hat around to support the International Development Association, which makes highly concessional loans to the poorest of the poor, it needed to demonstrate it was not wasteful of resources.

This would also be helpful if the Bank sought to expand its broader lending activities, in a post-crisis era when austerity would make a capital increase difficult if not impossible.

So was there fat to be cut?

‘Every organisation develops what you call fat. I don’t like that word, because it seems dismissive,’ Badré says. But he goes on to point out that the last big shake-up was in 1997, some 17 years earlier, so there is very little memory and it ‘creates more anxiety because the majority of people in the Bank had never experienced these things’.

Badré set about the task with gusto and a little help from consultants Booz Allen Hamilton. He built up a comprehensive picture of the group which, for the first time, presented the revenues and cost of running the whole organisation.

Who is Mr Badre? He certainly doesn't have the look of an axe-man

‘When I told the board [made up of directors from the main shareholding nations, including Britain] we wanted to save $400million, the first shock was $400million of what?’

He explained that it would have to be trimmed from $5billion, a figure that represented the cost of running the Bank irrespective of where the money came from or whether it was for services that might eventually be reimbursed.

Badré set a three-year target for bringing the costs down and also made it clear he wanted ‘change to be continuous’ not a ‘big drama’ happening every 15-20 years.

One obvious target, that has caused mayhem among staff, was the travel budget. The annual expense for travel works out at $500,000 a year which, Badré concedes, ‘is not shocking in itself for a global organisation’.

Nevertheless, the staff did not much like the ruling that the price to be paid for funding Bank projects ‘is sometimes you have to fly economy instead of business’.

He pointed out to them that ‘if in exchange we have $5billion to $8billion of additional grant money’ because we can demonstrate to shareholders that we are doing the job more cost effectively then ‘it’s a good investment’. People are losing their jobs but the finance boss is not saying how many.

Having been on Wall Street after September 11, when on the Wednesday afterwards ‘20 per cent of people were escorted to the door by a guy with a plastic box of their possessions and a cheque providing you don’t sue,’ Badré thinks there is a better way of sacking people. His solution is to ‘use natural attrition’ as much as possible, ‘but it’s not going to be nice for everybody’.

Badré is impressed by David Cameron’s commitment to devoting 0.7 per cent of national output to development assistance in the face of broadly based political and media criticism.

He points out that, globally, overseas aid is in decline, falling from $69billion to $50billion when he worked for French president Jacques Chirac in 2000 to just $25billion now.

His message is that public money ‘is as scarce as ever, so let’s leverage it’ and use it to incentivise the private sector to invest in unmet infrastructure needs.

Badré has a vision of creating off-the-shelf products in which giant funds, such as those run by BlackRock, could happily invest.

If he were to achieve that then Badré might be remembered for being more than just another accountant toying with the travel budget.